Going Barefoot in Warsaw during the First World War

Abstract

This article attempts to demonstrate how an entirely unexplored and seemingly unimportant episode, at least to grand historical narratives, can open up multiple lines of inquiry. In the course of my research on everyday life in Warsaw during the First World War, I came across an intriguing phenomenon—one might even call it a movement—of going “barefoot” (boso in Polish) during the last two years of the war. Initiated by students from Warsaw’s institutions of higher education as a means of symbolic protest against collapsed living standards, the barefoot movement would quickly spread to other groups. As it did, it generated a discourse that revealed existing cultural, political, ethnic, social, and gender-based tensions among an urban population made destitute by the exactions of the Great War. Having mined Warsaw’s daily press for any kind of reference to the barefoot movement, I have attempted in these pages to make some sense of this fleeting phenomenon by linking analysis of social and political unrest, metropolitan cultural debates, and the quotidian economic realities of wartime.